by B. M. Bower
The column mushroomed suddenly, rolling out in great, puffy billows before it dipped and went streaming away on the wind. The mountain beneath it spewed sluggish masses of vapor and ashes up into the black moil above, until the whole mountain was obscured and only an angry, rolling cloud churning lumpishly there, told what was hidden beneath.
Marion relaxed, took a long, deep breath and settled again to her trim heels. She was not filled with terror as Jack had been; though that may have been because she was not cast up here like a piece of driftwood out of her world, nor was she alone. But Jack paid her the tribute of bowing mentally before her splendid courage. She gazed a while longer, awed ecstasy in her face. Then slowly she swung and stared at that other churning cloud behind her—the crimsoned-tinted cloud of destruction. She flung out both arms impulsively.
“Oh, you world!” she cried adoringly, unafraid yet worshipping. “I’d like to be the wind, so I could touch you and kiss you and beat you, and make you love me the way I love you! I’d rather be a tree and grow up here and swing my branches in the wind and then burn, than be a little petty, piffling human being—I would! I’m not afraid of you. You couldn’t make me afraid of you. You can storm and rage around all you like. I only love you for it—you beautiful thing!”
It made Jack feel as though he had blundered upon a person kneeling in prayer; she was, after all, the goddess she looked, he thought whimsically. At least she had all the makings of a goddess of the mountain top. He felt suddenly inferior and gross, and he turned to leave her alone with her beautiful, terrible world. But manlike he did a frightfully human and earthly thing; he knocked his foot against an empty coal-oil can, and stood betrayed in his purpose of flight.
She turned her head and looked at him like one just waking from a too-vivid dream. She frowned, and then she smiled with a little ironical twist to her soft curving lips.
“You heard what I said about piffling human beings?” she asked him sweetly. “That is your catalogue number. Why for goodness’ sake! With your hair done in that marcelle pompadour, and that grin, you look exactly like Jack Corey, that Los Angeles boy that all the girls were simply crazy about, till he turned out to be such a perfectly terrible villain!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SYMPATHY AND ADVICE
Every bit of color was swept from Jack’s face, save the black of his lashes and eyebrows and the brown of his eyes that looked at her in startled self-betrayal. He saw the consternation flash into her face when she first understood how truly her random shot had hit the mark, and he dropped upon the bench by the doorway and buried his face in his shaking hands. But youth does not suffer without making some struggle against the pain. Suddenly he lifted his head and looked at her with passionate resentment.
“Well, why don’t you run and tell?” he cried harshly. “There’s the telephone in there. Why don’t you call up the office and have them send the sheriff hot-footing it up here? If Jack Corey’s such a villain, why don’t you do something about it? For the Lord’s sake don’t stand there looking at me as if I’m going to swallow you whole! Get somebody on the phone, and then beat it before I cut loose and be the perfectly awful villain you think I am!”
Marion took a startled step away from him, turned and came hesitatingly toward him. And as she advanced she smiled a little ostentatiously whimsical smile and touched the butt of her six-shooter.
“I’m heeled, so I should be agitated,” she said flippantly. “I always was crazy to get the inside dope on that affair. Tell me. Were you boys honest-to-goodness bandits, or what?”
“What, mostly.” Jack gave her a sullen, upward glance from under his eyebrows. “Go ahead and play at cat-and-mouse, if you want to. Nobody’ll stop you, I guess. Have all the fun you want—you’re getting it cheap enough; cheaper by a darned sight than you’ll get the inside dope you’re crazy for.”
“What do you know about it!—me running on to Jack Corey, away up here on the top of the world!” But it was hard to be flippant while she looked down into that stricken young face of his, and saw the white line around his lips that ought to be smiling at life; saw, too, the trembling of his bruised hands, that he tried so hard to hold steady. She came still closer; so close that she could have touched his arm.
“It was the papers called you such awful things. I didn’t,” she said, wistfully defensive. “I couldn’t—not after seeing you on the beach that day, playing around like a great big kid, and not making eyes at the girls when they made eyes at you. You—you didn’t act like a villain, when I saw you. You acted like a big boy that likes to have fun—oh, just oodles of fun, but hasn’t got a mean hair in his head. I know; I watched you and the fellows you were with. I was up on the pier looking down at you whooping around in the surf. And next day, when the girls at the Martha Washington read about it in the papers, I just couldn’t believe it was true, what they said about you boys being organized into bandits and all that, and leading a double life and everything.
“But it did look bad when you beat it—about two jumps ahead of the police, at that. You see Fred was along with the man that was shot, and being in the garage and around automobiles all the time, he thought to read the number of your car, and remembered it; near enough anyway, so that he knew for sure it was the Singleton Corey car by the make and general appearance of it, and identified it positively when he saw it in your garage. And that did make it look bad!”
“What did mother do when they—?” Jack did not look up while he stammered the question that had been three months feeding his imagination with horrors.
“Why, she didn’t do anything. She went right away, that very morning, to a sanitarium and would not see anybody but her own private nurse and her own private doctor. They gave out bulletins about how she slept and what she had for breakfast, and all that. But, believe me, brother, they didn’t get any dope from her! She just simply would not be interviewed!”
Jack let out a long breath and sat up. At the corners of his mouth there lurked the temptation to smile. “That’s mother—true to form,” he muttered admiringly.
“Of course, they scouted around and got most of the boys that were with you, but they couldn’t get right down to brass tacks and prove anything except that they were with you at the beach. They’re still holding them on bail or something, I believe. You know how those things kind of drop out of the news. There was a big police scandal came along and crowded all you little bandits off the front page. But I know the trial hasn’t taken place yet, because Fred would have to be a witness, so he’d know, of course. And, besides, the man hasn’t died or got well or anything, yet, and they’re waiting to see what he’s going to do.”
“Who’s Fred?” Jack stood up and leaned toward her, feeling all at once that he must know, and know at once, who Fred might be.
“Why, he’s Kate’s brother. He’s down here at Toll-Gate cabin, working out the assessments—”
Jack sat down again and caressed his bruised knuckles absently. “Well, then, I guess this is the finish,” he said dully, after a minute.
“Why? He’ll never climb up here—and if he did he wouldn’t know you. He couldn’t recognize your face by the number of your car, you know!” Then she added, with beautiful directness, “It wouldn’t be so bad, if you hadn’t been the ringleader and put the other boys up to robbing cars. But I suppose—”
Jack got up again, but this time he towered belligerently above her. “Who says I was the ringleader? If it was Fred I’ll go down there and push his face into the back of his neck for him! Who—”
“Oh, just those nice friends of yours. They wouldn’t own up to anything except being with you, but told everybody that it was you that did it. But honestly I didn’t believe that. Hardly any of us girls at the Martha did. But Fred—”
Just then the telephone rang again, and Jack had to go in and report the present extent of the fire, and tell just where and just how fast it was spreading, and what was the direction of the wind. The interruption steadied him,
gave him time to think.
Since the girl knew him, and knew the circumstances of his flight, and since the boys had turned on him, Jack argued with himself that he might just as well tell her what little there was to tell. There was nothing to be gained by trying to keep the thing a secret from her. Besides, he craved sympathy, though he did not admit it. He craved the privilege of talking about that night to some one who would understand, and who could be trusted. Marion Rose, he felt, was the only person in the world he could tell. He could talk to her—Lord, what a relief that would be! He could tell her all about it, and she would understand. Her sympathy at that moment seemed the most precious thing in the world.
So he went outside and sat down again on the bench, and told her the exact truth about that night; how it had started in drunken foolery, and all the rest of it. He even explained the exact route he had taken home so as to come into town apparently from Pasadena.
“Well, what do you know about that!” Marion murmured several times during the recital. And Jack found the phrase soothing whenever she uttered it, and plunged straightway into further revelations of his ebullient past.
“I suppose,” he ventured, when he could think of nothing more to tell and so came back to the starting point, “I ought to beat it outa here while the beating’s good. I can’t go back—on account of mother. I could hotfoot it up to Canada, maybe.…”
“Don’t you do it!” Marion wound the string of her vanity bag so tightly round and round her index finger that her pink, polished nail turned purple. She next unwound the string and rubbed the nail solicitously. “Just because we’re down there at Toll-Gate doesn’t mean you aren’t safe up here. Why, you’re safer, really. Because if any one got track of you, we’d hear of it right away—Kate and I walk to town once in a while, and there’s hardly a day passes that we don’t see somebody to talk to. Everybody talks when they meet you, in this country, whether they know you or not. And I could come up right away and tell you. Having a bandit treed up here on top would make such a hit that they’d all be talking about it. It certainly would be keen to listen to them and know more about it than any of them.”
“Oh, would it! I’m glad it strikes you that way—it don’t me.” What a fool a fellow was when he went spilling his troubles into a girl’s ears! He got up and walked glumly down to the niche in the rocks where he hid from tourists, and stood there with his hands in his pockets, glowering down at the fierce, ember-threaded waves of flame that surged through the forest. Dusk only made the fire more terrible to him. Had this new trouble not launched itself at him, he would be filled with a sick horror of the destruction, but as it was he only stared at it dully, not caring much about it one way or the other.
Well, he asked himself, what kind of a fool would he make of himself next? Unloading his secret and his heartache to a girl that only thought it would be “keen” to have a bandit treed up here at the lookout station! Why couldn’t he have kept his troubles to himself? He’d be hollering it into the phone, next thing he knew. They’d care, down there in the office, as much as she did, anyway. And the secret would probably be safer with them than it would be with her.
He had a mental picture of her hurrying to tell Fred: “What do you know about it? Jack Corey, the bandit, is treed up at the lookout station! He told me all the inside dope—” The thought of her animated chatter to Fred on the subject of his one real tragedy, made him clench his hands.
The very presence of her brought it back too vividly, though that had not struck him at first, when his hunger for human sympathy had been his keenest emotion. What a fool he had been, to think that she would care! What a fool he had been to think that these mountains would shelter him; to think that he could forget, and be forgotten. And Hen had told them that Jack Corey did it! That was about what Hen would do—sneak out of it. And the man wasn’t dead yet; not recovered either, for that matter. There was still the chance that he might die.
There was his mother hiding herself away from her world in a sanitarium. It was like her to do that—but it was hard to know he had broken up all the pleasant, well-ordered little grooves of her life; hard to know how her pride must suffer because he was her son. She would feel now, more than ever, that Jack was just like his father. Being like his father meant reproach because he was not like her, and that was always galling to Jack. And how she must hate the thought of him now.
He wished savagely that Marion Rose could go home. He wanted to be alone with his loneliness. It seemed to him now that being alone meant merely peace and contentment. It was people, he told himself finally, who had brought all this trouble and bitterness into his life.
He wished she would go and leave him alone, but that was manifestly impossible. Angry and hurt though he was, he could not contemplate the thought of letting her go down there into that blackened waste with the thick sprinkling of bonfires where stumps were all ablaze, fallen tangles of brush were smoldering, and dead trees flared like giant torches or sent down great blazing branches. She might get through without disaster, but it would be by a miracle of good luck. Even a man would hesitate to attempt the feat of working his way across the burning strip.
There was no other place where she could go. She could not go alone, in the dark, down the mountain to any of the lower ranches. She would get lost. A man would not try that either, unless forced to it. A man would rather spend the night under a tree than fight through miles of underbrush in the night. And she could not take the old Taylorville road down to Indian Valley, either. It was too far and too dark, and a slight change of the wind would send the fire sweeping in that direction. She might get trapped. And none of these impossibilities took into account the prowling wild animals that are at the best untrustworthy in the dark.
She would have to stay. And he would have to stay, and there did not seem to Jack to be any use in making a disagreeable matter still more disagreeable by sulking. He discovered that he was hungry. He supposed, now he came to think of it, that Marion Rose would be hungry, too. The protective instinct stirred once more within him and pushed back his anger. So he turned and went back to the little station.
Marion had lighted the little lamp, and she was cooking supper over the oil stove. She had found where he stored his supplies in a tightly built box under a small ledge, and she had helped herself. She had two plates and two cups set out upon his makeshift table, and while he stopped in the door she turned from the stove and began cutting slices of bread off one of the loaves which Hank had brought that day. With her head bent toward the lamp, her hair shown like pale gold. Her face looked very serious—a bit sad, too, Jack thought; though he could not see where she had any reason to be sad; she was not hiding away from the law, or anything like that.
When she became conscious of his presence she glanced up at him with swift inquiry. “How’s the fire?” she wanted to know, quite as though that was the only subject that interested them both.
“She’s all there,” he returned briefly, coming in.
“Everything’s ready,” she announced cheerfully. “You must be half starved. Do you see what time it is? nearly eight o’clock already. And I never dreamed it, until a bird or something flew right past my face and brought me to myself. I was watching Mount Lassen. Isn’t it keen, to have a volcano spouting off right in your front view? And a fire on the other side, so if you get tired looking at one, you can turn your head and look at the other one. And for a change, you can watch the lake, or just gaze at the scenery; and say!—does the star spangled banner still wave?”
“She still waves,” Jack assented somberly, picking up the wash basin. Why couldn’t he enter the girl’s foolery? He used to be full of it himself, and he used to consider that the natural form of companionship. He must be getting queer like all other hermits he had ever heard of. It occurred to him that possibly Marion Rose was not really feather-brained, but that the trouble was in himself, because he was getting a chronic grouch.
He was thinking while he ate. He had plenty of enco
uragement for thinking, because Marion herself seemed to be absorbed in her own thoughts. When she was filling his coffee cup the second time, she spoke quite abruptly.
“It would be terribly foolish for you to leave here, Jack Corey—or whatever you would rather be called. I don’t believe any one has the faintest notion that you came up here into this country. If they had, they would have come after you before this. But they’re still on the watch for you in other places, and I suppose every police station in the country has your description tacked on the wall or some place.
“I believe you’d better stay right where you are, and wait till something turns up to clear you. Maybe that man will get well, and then it won’t be so serious; though, of course, being right through his lungs, the doctors claim it’s pretty bad. I’ll know if he dies or not, because he’s a friend of Fred’s, and Fred would hear right away. And we can make up a set of signals, and flash them with glasses, like we were doing just for fun this afternoon. Then I won’t have to climb clear up here if something happens that you ought to know about—don’t you see? I can walk out in sight of here and signal with my vanity mirror. It will be fun.
“And when you’re through here, if I were you I’d find some nice place here in the hills to camp. It isn’t half as bad to stay right in the mountains, as it would be to stay in town and imagine that every strange man you see has come after you. Sometimes I wish I could get right out where there’s not a soul, and just stay there. Being in the woods with people around is not like being in the woods with just the woods. I’ve found that out. People kind of keep your mind tied down to little things that part of you hates, don’t you know? Like when I’m with Kate, I think about facial massage and manicuring, and shows that I’d like to see and can’t, and places where I’d like to go and eat and watch the people and dance and listen to the music, and can’t; and going to the beaches when I can’t, and taking automobile trips when I can’t, and boys—and all that sort of thing. But when I’m all by myself in the woods, I never think of those things.”